The Holocaust in Ingmar Bergman's Persona: The Instability of Imagery

Abstract

IN INGMAR BERGMAN'S 1966 film Persona, one of the most striking moments occurs when the actress who has tried to shut out the troublesome aspects of everyday reality by becoming silent, mute, picks up a book from her night table. A photograph falls out. She looks at it and props it up against the kerosene lamp and contemplates it. It is a picture of a little Jewish boy, with his hands held high, walking toward and past the camera. A German soldier behind him is pointing his rifle at him. A number of women and children, most of them also with their hands high, are following him. The camera then moves into the still photograph for some close-ups and an examination of some of its details, and then, after a return to a close-up of the little boy's face, it moves, accompanied by a disharmonious chord on the soundtrack, to black and fades out. The effect of this intrusion of reality into the fiction is shocking. It also piques our curiosity. We want to know more about the photograph. What, specifically, is its function in the film? Is it really necessary to invoke the Holocaust in order to portray the spiritual crisis of a comfortably situated actress in 1960s Sweden? Is there a relationship between the notion of the Holocaust, as portrayed in that photograph, and the larger themes and concerns of the film? And, not least, who is the little boy, and what is known about him? In this essay, after some general remarks on the prevalence of still photographs in Bergman's works, I want to (1) discuss the provenance of the Holocaust photograph itself and the difficulties of interpretation that haunt such images; (2) consider in detail its appearance in the film; (3) consider its relationship to some central themes in the film, above all the relationship between biological reproduction and mechanical photographic reproduction; (4) relate the photograph to the other documentary sequence in the film, the televised footage of the suicide of a Vietnamese monk, also observed by the actress; and (5) consider how such images question the idea of narrative itself in a way that situates the film on the edge between modernism and postmodernism. I hope to have shown that all these aspects of the photograph, its history, features, and use make it an icon of the instability of interpretation, and that this--and all the attendant emotions, such as horror, despair, abandonment, jealousy, rage--is a central theme in Persona. In a moving picture, the still photograph, almost by definition, functions as the other, arresting time, limiting the flow of narrative itself, suggesting possibilities of interpretation, transforming a diachronic view into a synchronic exploration of simultaneities, memories, moments. The still photograph, thus, takes us from time to space. It presents us with material that can function as evidence, the way things were. The Swedish critic Leif Zern has pointed out that in Ingmar Bergman's films everything seems already to have happened and that this dooms the characters to a sense of loss and regret: Det som varit ar sannare an det som ar, och mellan den som ar ung och den som ar gammal finns en avgrund av glomska, fortrangningar och doda illusioner. Vi lever som skeppsbrutna bland vara minnen och letar efter bevis pa art vi levde. Dagbocker, fotografier, brev och andra document far en dramatisk innebord nar Bergman skall beskriva kriser och liknande vandpunkter: de vittnar om nuets bracklighet. (64) (What has been is truer than what is, and between the one who is young and the one who is old there is an abyss of forgetfulness, repressions and dead illusions. We live like shipwrecked people among our memories and look for proofs that we have lived. Diaries, photographs, letters and other documents get a dramatic meaning when Bergman tries to describe crises and similar turns: they testify to the fragility of the now.) In films like Smultronstallet or Sommarlek, for example, the chance appearance of an old box of toys or an old diary conjures up the past, that which has been lost, and brings on the crisis of the present. …

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